It was a busy weekend in the Lazy Man household. After catching up with the extended family on Thanksgiving, I turned my attention to the Black Friday deals.
I don’t see the value in waiting in long lines and “busting doors”, so I focused on the deals that were easy. Last year, that amounted to picking up a $99 laptop at Staples at midnight of Thanksgiving. I arrived 10 minutes before midnight and was out by 12:05AM.
This year, I didn’t see any such deals. Instead, my wife and I turned our attention to the local Navy base. They don’t have the same extreme deals that Best Buy or Wal-Mart have, but there are usually a few deals. We left spending nearly $300. If there was an award for unplanned spending of the week, we’d be serious contenders.
The one item that I really focused on at the Navy base was this Cuisinart Griddler. With over 5000 great reviews, I felt very confident that was going to be a quality product. A price of $50 was well worth the gamble. My wife was skeptical until she saw two of her favorite words – “dishwasher safe.” After that, she was all in. We said goodbye to a ten-year old George Foreman Grill that had the Teflon worn off and became a Griddler family. There’s a learning curve, but so far it looks like a winner.
While we were on the base, we picked up birthday and Christmas presents for the family. A lot of small things added up, which lead to some big spending. I saw that they were selling gift cards for $75 that included a $10 bonus on a purchase of $75 or more. We bought a couple of them first and used the bonuses in the next transactions to save a quick $20. The cashiers were impressed as I guess no one else thought of it.
After that, I popped into Old Navy to buy a pair of jeans because everything was 50% off. Old Navy jeans are typically cheap to begin with, but it’s really hard to be $15.
That lead to Small Business Saturday. My wife really gets into it. I cringe, because it usually means hitting the local boutiques that are outrageously priced to start with. Getting a Small Business Saturday discount seems to just bring it into the “very overpriced” range. Fortunately, this year the deals seemed to be better. We might have even got a few items fairly priced. I was mostly focused on the kids, so I wasn’t paying full attention.
I was originally going to give you my favorite Cyber Monday deals, but I’m all shopped out for today. Instead, I’ll point you to my favorite deal site, Slickdeals, which seems to have something for everyone. I use the site to find most of my deals and today there are more deals than usual.
That said, the best Cyber Monday deal I’ve seen is this this package from Studenomics. It’s every guide Martin has ever written for $17. He’s great at breaking down concepts to the things that really matter. There’s a big return for a small amount of money and a small amount of time to digest the material.
We’ve done a bit of shopping. I haven’t started too much in earnest though my wife does most of the purchasing, so I can oncentrate largely on her gifts :)